The Nine Days' Queen, Lady Jane Grey, and Her Times. Richard Davey
Grey whose signature may be seen on the warrant for the execution of Charles I.
A careful observation of the irregularities of the soil reveals traces of a tilt-yard and of garden terraces; but all is now overgrown by Spanish chestnut trees, wild flowers, nettles, and brambles. The gardens were once considered amongst the finest in England, Lord Dorset taking great pride in the cultivation of all the fruits, herbs, and flowers then grown in Northern Europe. The parterres and terraces were formal, and there was a large fish-pond full of golden carp and water lilies. Lady Jane Grey must often have played in these stately avenues, and there is a legend that once, as a little girl, she toppled into the tank and was nearly drowned—a less hideous fate than that which was to befall her in her seventeenth year.
“This was thy home, then, gentle Jane!
This thy green solitude; and here
At evening, from thy gleaming pane,
Thine eyes oft watched the dappled deer
(Whilst the soft sun was in its wane)
Browsing beside the brooklet clear.
The brook yet runs, the sun sets now,
The deer still browseth—where art thou?”
These sentimental lines were written in the eighteenth century, when deer still browsed in Bradgate Park, whence they have long since departed. Many curious traditions concerning Lady Jane are even now current among the local peasantry. Some believe that on St. Sylvester’s night (31st December) a coach drawn by four black horses halts at the door of the old mansion. It contains the headless form of the murdered Lady Jane. After a brief halt it drives away again into the mist. Then again, certain strange3 stunted oaks are shown, trees which the woodmen pollarded when they heard that the fair girl had been beheaded. The pathetic memories of the great tragedy, reaching down four slow centuries, prove how keenly its awful reality was felt by the poorer folk at Bradgate, who, no doubt, had good cause to love the “gentle Jane.”
The Manor of Bradgate was settled upon the Lady Frances Brandon, Henry VIII’s niece, when she espoused Henry Grey. It had been inherited by the Greys of Groby, Lady Jane’s paternal ancestors, from Rollo, or Fulbert, said to have been chamberlain to Robert, Duke of Normandy, who gave him the Castle of Croy in Picardy, the ruins of which are still to be seen not far from Montreuil-sur-Mer. It was hence he derived the surname of de Croy, afterwards anglicised to de Grey. This Rollo accompanied William the Conqueror into England, and was settled, soon after the Conquest, at Rotherfield, in Oxfordshire. The first of the family to be noticed by Dugdale is Henry de Grey, to whom Richard I granted the Manor of Grey’s Thurrock, in Essex, which grant was confirmed by King John in the first year of his reign. The descendant of this nobleman, Edward de Grey, was summoned to Parliament in 1488 in right of his wife’s barony of Ferrers of Groby, and his son John, afterwards Earl Rivers, who was slain in the battle of St. Albans, married the beautiful daughter of Sir John Woodville, subsequently the Queen of Edward IV. Bradgate is thus associated with two of the most unfortunate of England’s Queens: Elizabeth Woodville, who passed much of her life in its leafy glades; and Lady Jane Grey, who first saw the light in the stately red brick Manor House of which the crumbling ruins are now so beautiful in their decay.
Jane Grey’s grandfather, Thomas, the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville, was summoned to Parliament on the 17th October 1509 as Lord Ferrers of Groby, his mother’s barony, and to the second Parliament in 1511 as Marquess of Dorset. He was a man of great note. In the third year of Henry VIII’s reign he had charge of the army of 10,000 men sent into Spain to assist the forces invading Guyenne under the Emperor Ferdinand. This force returned to England without doing service. We next hear of the Marquess figuring at the jousts with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Lady Jane’s maternal grandfather, on the occasion of the latter’s adventurous journey to France to bring back Mary Tudor, widow of Louis XII of France, whom he subsequently married. The Marquess was also sent to Calais to attend Charles V to England; indeed, he was very conspicuous throughout the early years of Henry’s reign. King Hal paid him the compliment of calling him “that honest and good man”—a title which he thought he richly deserved, since he signed the celebrated letter to Pope Clement VII touching the King’s divorce. He died in 1530, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Henry, Lady Jane’s father. The inheritance of this nobleman included the Marquisate of Dorset and the baronies of Ferrers,4 Grey, Astley, Boneville, and Harrington, besides vast estates in Leicestershire and other parts of England. Henry Grey, though his portraits show him to have been a very good-looking man, did not enjoy a good contemporary reputation for ability or strength of character. During the brief reign of Edward VI he became the patron of the Swiss Reformers and was adulated by Bullinger and Hill. His name will be found attached to many of Henry VIII’s anti-papal decrees, and so long as that monarch lived, he was a staunch “Henryite” or schismatic, professing belief in all the doctrines of Rome save and except papal supremacy. In 1531, when the clergy were threatened with præmunire and mulcted in a fine, as a punishment for their too close attention to pontifical interests, young Henry of Dorset, who had just come to his own, displayed great energy in carrying out the King’s wishes and supporting his attempt to get himself acknowledged supreme head of the English Church. He also evinced considerable courage in connection with Henry VIII’s resistance to the excommunication of the Pope, launched against him after his marriage with Anne Boleyn. Such zeal in his sovereign’s service undoubtedly led to his advancement and paved the way to his marriage with the King’s niece, the Lady Frances Brandon. He may have owed much to the counsels and influence of Cromwell, to whom he carried a letter of introduction from his mother,5 when he first went to London as a lad of seventeen, immediately after his father’s decease. The Dowager recommended her son very earnestly to “Master Cromwell,” pleaded his youth, and besought that worthy, then all-powerful, not to take heed of certain ill-natured reports concerning alleged wilful damage to the priory buildings of Tylsey, where she was then residing.5
The good lady couches her letter in very humble terms, but does not enlighten us fully about the nature of the “damage” to which she refers, or by whom it was done. She seems, at any rate, to be in a terrible fright lest the tale should injure her son’s prospects with the all-powerful Chancellor. Some little time afterwards the Marchioness wrote another letter to Cromwell complaining of her son’s undutiful behaviour to her. It is dated from the “House of Our Lady’s Passyon”6 (the Priory of Tylsey), and begins:—
“My Lorde—I beseeche you to be my good lorde, consyderyng me a poor wydo, so unkyndly and extreymly escheated by my son.”
This curious epistle, now in the British Museum, is much defaced and in parts illegible. The name of the person to whom it is addressed is undecipherable, but, taken in conjunction with two other letters previously addressed to Cromwell by the same correspondent, there can be little doubt as to its destination. Her son had evidently withheld some property intended for her under her husband’s will. Whether he mended his manners and paid her the money, we know not; but as the Dowager is occasionally mentioned as attending Court functions in company with her daughter-in-law, it seems probable that the ultimate issue of the difficulty, whatever it was, was satisfactory to her.
Margaret, Dowager Lady Dorset, became one of the greatest ladies of the Court in the latter years of the reign of Henry VII and during a part of that of Henry VIII. She was in much request, it seems, at royal christenings, for not only was she specially invited to that of Mary Tudor, afterwards Queen Mary I, but she enjoyed the signal honour of carrying the infant Elizabeth to the font. She was invited to perform a like office at the baptism of Edward VI, but this time she was unable to be present, and wrote to make her loyal excuses, pleading that some of her household at Croydon had been attacked by the “sweating sickness.” It is probable that she had no desire to attend, for she had been the intimate friend of Anne Boleyn, and could hardly have felt kindly towards Jane Seymour.7 Her place was filled by the Marchioness of Exeter, who eventually, after the execution of her luckless husband, was sent to the Tower on a flimsy charge of treason, and kept there until Mary I’s time.8
A singular point in the history of Jane Grey’s forbears is that her father, in his hot haste to marry into the royal family, set aside, without the slightest scruple, his legitimate